How to Know

I can hear this storm coming in. From my bedroom, I eavesdrop on the song and dance of wind, the secrets of storms and it sounds as if the earth is settling, like a house settles.

But then there's the safety I feel here and so, though doom and gloom is forecasted, it's still hard to comprehend any crisis in these clouds. Where I sit is warm and I have everything I need.

I need to go where there is suffering. I need to know what makes God weep. I am deprived of knowing what I need to know. America is too comfortable. We are too at peace with it all, complacent. And this globe is huge. We are so small. Reading of these other continents, whose hands hold grief on a daily basis, take it as a given. What do the hands of our country hold? Hold tightly to? What do our own hands hold? Are they marked with piercings when they ought to be? I can't reconcile where I am in comparison to where so many have been and will continue to be. To where I've always been to where they've always been. Separate worlds, we inhabit. It is an illusion to think it's all the same orb. How can it be, when we here, know nothing, for all we think we know?

Just as from my haven, though I hear the racket, evidence of the weather's tantrum, the threat, it doesn't touch my skin.

Where can I go to acquaint myself to the truth I believe in, so that I might know? Would I want to, really? Would I be fearless enough to allow the grit to dirty my skin so my interior could be washed? And then what? Then what would I do with the knowledge? It could never be familiarity. So how could I ever know even a modicum of what God does? Grasp just a bit of what He does, without collapsing under the weight of it all?